Personal online presence is your personal brand. Everything you do, say, post, comment or share on the internet is a representation of your brand. Having a good personal online presence is preferred for a couple of reasons:
1) It helps you to get more opportunities in your career as you can be easily spotted by potential employers or sponsors. 2) It helps you to tell your story the way you want it to be told. 3) Online presence is the best way to promote a business and its services.
To create an online presence, you will need several things:
1. Domain name
A domain name is an identification string that defines an organization or other entity on the internet. In other words, it is a URL that identifies your site and makes it able to be found on the world wide web.
2. Website builder or hosting services
It is the place or tool where your website is stored and maintained.
3. Email service (optional)
It allows you to use the domain-based email address like address@domainname.com which makes the email address look professional and trustworthy.
4. SSL certificate (optional)
It allows you to protect your website if it handles sensitive information like credit cards or other account information. It provides privacy, critical security and data integrity for both your websites and your users' personal information.
Let’s take a closer look at each of them.
Domain name
Domain name is the first step towards the online presence. Its function on the internet is similar to a physical address in the physical world. Before you can use it, the domain name needs to be registered.
Once a domain name is defined, follow the instructions below to register it:
1) Sign into your Wernerhost account (The Sign In option is available in the client area). If you do not have an account with us, feel free to sign up here or you can sign up after picking a domain.
2) Click Domains on the left of the page in the menu or use the box on the page.
3) Type the domain you want (in the domainname.com format) in the search field, then hit the “Search” button:
4) Next to the price, you will see the “Add To Cart” icon that you need to use in order to add your domain name to the shopping cart:
5) Click “continue”, check all the details or add/edit your items:
At this stage, you will be able to pick other items that may be useful for exploring the online world. You will be able to add an SSL certificate or Search Engine Optimization to your domain name.
Hosting/Website building services
Once you have the domain name registered, you may need a page or series of related pages that would represent you or your company and show up when you enter the domain name in the browser. The most relevant example would be this article, which is a page on the Wernerhost website.
There are lots of different ways to get a website online. Some of them require technical expertise and experience in things like HTML, CSS, and other coding languages. But there are ways to build a website without any of those skills – the easiest to use is a website builder. We provide website design as an addon service for custom projects too.
We currently offer a website builder. You can find more information about it in this section.
Using these services, you do not have to be a developer or designer to make a great site. They allow you not only to create a great website, but also to give the power to maintain it as often as you like. Website builders are suitable for anyone with a basic understanding of technology – if you can post photos or videos to Facebook, then you meet the requirements.
Website builder is provided in your client area.
Once purchased, your services will be available in the client areahere.
An advanced user may consider purchasing a hosting account. A hosting account apportions space on a server and includes a set amount of data transfer traffic from your computer to the host's server so you can upload entire pages, images, multimedia files, or change existing pages. Hosting allows you to build your own website using different coding languages or special site-building software that requires to be installed on the server, upload created pages with sophisticated functionality and modify your site in almost limitless ways.
In case you wish to get a hosting plan, feel free to review our hosting packages at this page.
Once a hosting plan is purchased and activated, our system will email Your Hosting Welcome Guide with all login details to your contact email address.
The main difference between both services is in the functionality they provide. A website builder is mainly used to create simple landing or informational pages while hosting service allows creating fully functional complex websites. So considering the differences, you may use a website builder service to quickly create a landing or "under construction" page for your website while building a more complicated site in a hosting environment. Also, you can have multiple websites created in one hosting account, which means that our web-hosting solution will be the best option to manage them all.
Email services
Your email address is a valuable tool to market your website. An address like address@domainname.com tells people you have an online domain (domainname.com) where they can find out more about you. It makes you stand out, providing you with a kind of power, expert status thing.
So you may consider getting a benefit from the email services we offer.
If you are going to communicate effectively through the domain-based email address either for business purposes or for your personal needs, you need a fully-fledged email service that allow you to send and receive emails. We currently offer this with all hosting packages for free.
SSL certificate
With a new domain registration, you may also grab our PositiveSSL at an exclusive price of $29.99. PositiveSSL is one of the most popular and inexpensive certificates in the industry. Typically, SSL is used to secure credit card transactions, data transfer and logins, and now becomes the norm when securing browsing of social media sites. Moreover, it may positively influence your website ranking as Google increases it for websites that use the https protocol.
To add a certificate, just check the box during checkout.
6) Once all the desired items are added to the cart, click on “Checkout” to proceed with the checkout:
In case you already have hosting/website building services purchased elsewhere and they provided you with nameservers to use for connecting the domain name and your website, you may consider specifying custom nameservers right during the checkout to save your time later. If you are registering the domain name on behalf of someone else or want to use the contact details that differ from the ones in your account, you may need to check the domain contact details.
7) Enter your card information securely.
Also, there is an option to select your billing address for the receipt. You may choose from your current Account details, add New set of contacts or use one of the Saved set of details:
